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New Urban Mechanics is a network of civic innovation offices. Across the network, we explore how new technology, designs and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all.

There are some estimates that five percent of all AI talent within the private sector are currently employed by Google. Perhaps no one among that rich talent pool has as deep a set of perspectives as Geoff Hinton. He has been involved in AI research since the early 1970s, which means he got involved before the field was really defined.

Yann LeCun once built an AI chip called ANNA. But he was 25 years ahead of his time. He and several other researchers designed this chip to run deep neural networks—complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data—but ANNA never reached the mass market.

“Today’s models can be trained on huge quantities of data, but that’s not enough,” says Bengio, who together with LeCun and Google’s Geoffrey Hinton is one of the original musketeers of deep learning. “We need to discover learning algorithms that can take better advantage of all this unlabeled data that’s sitting out there.”

How can AI benefit Gov?

The summit will explore how to apply machine learning methods and tools to increase efficiency in government, reduce costs, & help meet ever increasing demands of the public sector. What are the key implementation challenges faced by government bodies? How can automation ease challenges?